Medical adventures in a distant land

In 2002 Timm travelled with Project Helping Hands to Bolivia for a 2-week mission conducting medical clinics. Timm helped out with running the clinics and took many photographs. He did some marketing work for Project Helping Hands after that and hoped he might score a job with them, but like many other gigs in social service, it's hard to make a living. (Why is it that the trades which contribute the least to the human race, such as pro basketball and oil harvesting, make so much dough, while the pastors and social workers make next to nil?) Anyway, the following article Timm filed at the Slayton Appeal in Feb. 2003. The pics are from his archives.

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BOLIVIA – Eight legs slowly made their way across my face, jarring me from a sound sleep. Instinctively I swatted the spider sending it sailing into the long grass that was near my sleeping bag. As I waited for my heart rate to slow I gazed again at the profusion of stars above forming constellations as foreign as the Bolivian landscape I was in. Nearby, 15 of my teammates, seven of them medical professionals from the states, two Bolivian missionaries- cum-interpreters, four students from the dental school in La Paz and our driver Roberto, slept soundly after another busy day of medical clinics. We were six days into the two-week trip with Project Helping Hands (PHH), holding medical clinics in the Andean foothills and western jungles of the Amazon Basin.

Lying there I still remember my first introduction to PHH nine months prior in a restaurant parking lot in Salem. A recent acquaintance, Jeff Solheim, founder of the medical mission, was sharing his past travels as we leaned against our cars in the early morning hours. I had done eight such trips before, but it had been nearly 10 years and never with a medical organization. After all, my medical training was only a little bit more advanced than basic first aid. This didn't seem to matter according to Solheim since non-medical personnel were needed to help keep the clinic running smoothly. With little more than a burning desire, I beraised the $1350.00, got shots for diseases I only heard of in horror flicks and updated my passport, preparing to disappear into the jungle.

We landed in mid –August at the LaPaz airport, nestled in a bowl situated at 13,000 feet between the 19,000 snow-capped Andean peaks. The PHH group numbered 34 in all broken into four teams. One flew out of LaPaz to the town of Cochabamba while the rest of us went on to the province of Caranavi. A surgical team stayed in the provincial capital of Caranavi, while the two jungle teams, one of which I was assigned to, disappeared in opposite directions.


We left LaPaz, a city of 3 million and descended into the jungles along a dirt track dubbed "the worlds most dangerous highway”. The cliffs dropped 1000 to 2000 feet straight down from the road that monthly saw a vehicle plunge down their slopes.

The first two impressions I had from the road were strong and contradictory. I was mesmerized by the incredible beauty of the Andes in the west and the lush rain forest further east but sickened by the extreme poverty. Paved roads were unheard of except in the major cities, outhouses consisted of four walls and a concrete floor that dumped waste upstream from where people bathed and washed their clothes. In the ruts of the roads children played in pools of gray water as their bellies protruded from a combination of worms and malnutrition. Billions of dollars in aid has flowed in from the United States and Europe, but with Bolivia's history of political corruption, little if any of the money trickled down to the general populace.


Nowhere was this more apparent then in the outlying areas we visited. Our second stop was in a little village at the end of the road, home to 400 settlers, each given a 100-acre plot to carve out from the jungle, but failed to produce much food. When we first arrived at 8 p.m. villagers were already waiting to see us, and since there was no electricity we were forced to light the interior of the small schoolhouse we set up in with the headlights of our trucks. A mother brought in her one-year-old daughter with a simple complaint – worms occasionally crawled from the child’s mouth. While worms were common, their affects were often devastating when coupled with malnutrition. The child ran a high fever and as the nurses worked on her she barely cried. When this far removed from modern facilities, without lab or diagnostic equipment staff could only go with what we could surmise.

“I can’t tell how bad the worms are, but if they are coming out of her mouth chances are they are in her organs also,” said Christine Hall, a nurse from Arkansas. The mother was encouraged to make the three-day walk to a jungle hospital, but decided against it since she held to the local belief that the only reason you go to the hospital was to die. She was given a worm medication, antibiotics, instructed on their use, encouraged again to take the girl to a hospital and then disappeared from the clinic.

Not all of the cases were as tragic with about half of the people just wanting to be reassured that they were o.k. One such village proved just how important this was. We had arrived in the village of Villa Monte early in the afternoon of our third day, saw many of the townspeople than as the cases became more of reassurance and we were expected at another village that evening we packed up and moved on. The next day we had to pass back by the same village and were greeted by many of the villagers who, brandishing machetes, informed us that we would stay and finish seeing everybody.


Each day we were in a different village, traveling by truck or boat. As we pushed deeper into the jungle the scenery became wilder. Flocks of red and green parrots would occasionally circle overhead, monkeys were in the trees and the danger of jaguars lurked in the dark woods. At night we would sleep in the schools that doubled as clinics and occasionally bed down under the stars.

The members of my team came from across the U.S. and for reasons that were as unique as each member. Vicki had raised her kids and saw them and her husband all take similar trips — now it was her turn. Larry, our oldest member at 67 wanted to prove that he could still do such a trip. Meg, a fellow Salem-ite was in love with adventure. Pat and Christine whose nests' were now empty took full advantage of their new freedom. Our other Kris who, like I was non-medical, had never done anything like this and saw it as a chance to expand her comfort zone. Our leader Jeff, who was celebrating his 30th trip with PHH had a heart for the third world. But for Joy, this was perhaps he biggest step. Three years ago her only two children were killed in a car accident, tearing her world apart and pushing her into a grief-filled isolation. In the aftermath of her loss she tried to return to nursing, but struggled.

"Every time a helicopter would come in my office would shake and I would remember when it was my daughters that it brought," said Joy.

The trip was her attempt to step back into life, not forgetting what had happened but as she stated moving on with their memory. One night while we were in a village high in the mountains, she shared her story. We stood outside while a storm was developing in the Andean peaks on the horizon. The clouds built-up, lighting lit the night as thunder shook the ground until finally the storm dissipated. I couldn't help but marvel at the parallels. Here she was, having seen her own storm erupt, sending shockwaves through her life and was now finding her own clouds beginning to clear

By the time we left the jungles, 1,450 Bolivians had passed through our clinics, bringing the total for all teams on this trip to nearly 4,500. The people would usually came on their own power, walking up to three days, while a few had to be carried and one elderly woman even arrived in a wheelbarrow. I know of two children that are alive today by our interventions, but I fear a third is dead. The poverty has made the people desperate - wanting to know that they will be all right, but fearing they aren't. We transported two patients from the jungle to city hospitals in Bolivia and one boy who suffered a serious burn is now in a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri , thanks to the generosity of several team members and their communities.

We will probably never know the full impact of what medical trips like this accomplish. There are ways we could track patients we saw and conduct studies but the results would do little to deter people from going. Each team member seemed to share the same belief that we each had something to offer, no matter how small, and by using this gift we believed it would make a difference in somebody’s life.